As I was driven from the bus station to my accommodation, the taxi driver asked me when I was last in Skopje. Four years ago, I replied. Oh, you will see a lot of changes. I knew something about the transformation Skopje was undergoing under the government’s ‘Skopje 2014’ project. I knew it was grandiose, and I knew it was controversial, and had elicited much criticism. I had come to see for myself. Do you like the changes, I asked? Yes, he replied, very definitely. I heard such positive responses from others during my visit. Some were clearly pleased at the prospect of a more monumental capital. Others I spoke to reserved their judgment, saying it would take time before a proper evaluation could be made. Others simply loathed the whole thing.
Skopje suffered a huge earthquake in 1963, which destroyed the majority of the city. Poignantly, the hands of the clock on the broken façade of the old railway station, now the city museum, still stand at the moment the earthquake struck. It was the city’s misfortune to be reconstructed in the style of 1960s and 1970s communism, all hideous concrete, now crumbling and decomposing. The result was a famously ugly city centre.
Even more unfortunate, the city became increasingly divided along the Vardar River, which bisects the city. On one side, the ugly modern town, mainly populated by Macedonians; on the other, the old Ottoman-era bazaar, with a largely Albanian character, and the Romany district of Shuto Orizari on its furthest outskirts. The old bazaar district has its charm. There are some fine Ottoman era buildings, several mosques, and Turkish baths (now an art gallery). And the low buildings, the shops selling baklava and other sweet Turkish cakes, the kebab places, the cafes with men drinking sweet tea and playing backgammon. Sadly, that charm had been largely unappreciated and neglected by city governments uninterested in Albanian quarters of the city.
Yet despite all this, I liked Skopje. Many others liked Skopje too. I first visited the city in 1988, when it was still Yugoslavia. I was there for only 24 hours, a very memorable 24 hours.
With a young American companion, I had an excellent dinner in the old bazaar, for what seemed an absurdly low price. Having no other means of communicating with the waiter, we simply pointed at our mouths, indicating ‘food’. It was a weekend, and, while bottles of wine were placed on restaurant tables, indicating that they were reserved, swarms of young people stood in the streets, all dressed up, chatting and laughing. It seemed, given the lack of means of Skopje’s young people, such street gatherings were the main form of socialising. Skopje was a fun city.* During later stays, I spent wild nights in some of the town’s frenetic live-music venues. There were excellent restaurants, second to none in former Yugoslavia. The river front, alongside the Vardar, was faced by lively cafes and bars. Excellent cocktails. Skopje even had an openly gay scene, quite original in a region otherwise blighted by homophobia. In short, Skopje was cool.
The new makeover for the city is astounding in its ambition. It is as if the planners wanted to transform Skopje into the grandest, most splendid city in Europe, and set about doing it in three or four years. Massive new monuments litter the town centre. At its heart is a huge statue of Alexander the Great on the main square, sword in hand on a rearing horse, all atop a massive platform. Over the elegant Ottoman-era stone bridge across the Vardar stands an even more massive statue of Alexander’s father, Phillip of Macedon. Such monuments, although they are not officially named for Alexander and Phillip, are clearly intended to poke the Greeks in the eye. Athens insists that Alexander and Phillip are exclusively Hellenic figures, and that raising their statues in Skopje, as well as naming the airport, the football stadium, and the main north-south highway after them, amounts to a usurpation of Greek history. In part, the erection of such monuments reflects Macedonian despair at Greece’s persistent blocking of the country’s integration with NATO and the EU. Opposition criticisms of Skopje 2014 say such monuments needlessly antagonise Greece, and set back the country’s hopes for joining the European mainstream. But Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski seems to have concluded that, given Greece’s recalcitrance, and the weakness of the rest of Europe in face of it, the integration promise is, for the foreseeable future, a chimera. So all this emphasis on Alexander and Phillip is a big ‘Ya Boo Sucks’ to Greece. It is of course utterly puerile, and stoops to the Greeks’ own fatuous level. But it is just a little understandable given Greece’s unreasonableness.
A stronger reproach against Skopje 2014 is its lack of architectural or aesthetic merit. The whole project reflects the ambitions and tastes of megalomaniac politicians. Its guiding spirit is nationalist aggrandisement. The sheer bombastic bulk of the Alexander statue is bad enough, but it really comes into its own at night, when the fountain it sits above is irradiated by a multi-coloured lights show. In many cities you can find horrendously kitsch souvenirs, but in Skopje they decided to create the original champion of kitsch. The city is being turned into a pastiche of the great capitals of Europe. There is a triumph arch to compete with Paris, a higher concentration of statues than London, and several new neoclassical buildings, or old buildings being given a neoclassical facelift. There are new bridges, one of them with statues along it, reminiscent of Prague. Even the new buses have been copied from London, red double-deckers clearly styled on the beloved old Routemasters.
Giving Skopje a makeover was perhaps not a bad idea in itself. Other drab post-communist capitals in the region, Tirana, Podgorica, Prishtina, have made efforts to smarten up. But no other city has attempted anything approaching Skopje’s ambition. A transformation on such a scale is difficult to digest in such a short timeframe. Some elements are surely positive: the revamped stadium; the improved infrastructure; the rebuilding of the national theatre destroyed in 1963. Some of the new buildings are of a more contemporary design, notably the Philharmonic Orchestra hall. Skopje had the chance to build contemporary buildings of note that might have put the city on the map.
It has done it before. The Church of St. Clement of Ohrid, Skopje’s Orthodox cathedral, finished in 1990, is a remarkably adventurous and interesting building. With its domes, it is identifiably an Orthodox church, yet its design is modern, an updated take on the traditional Byzantine model that most new Orthodox churches continue slavishly and boringly to follow. The fountain in front of the church, presented by the city’s Islamic community, was also a remarkable symbol of unity in a city divided along ethnic and religious lines.
But, one or two buildings aside, the present revamp of the city does not follow such a path. The buildings and monuments being erected are not bold, not original, not interesting. There is no vision beyond a bland reiteration of the worn out styles of other cities and of bygone eras. As I looked upon all of this, I wondered whether the old cool Skopje could possibly survive? The bars along the Vardar are still there. The Cuban bar still fizzes in the evenings. But I couldn’t escape the view of the new buildings across the river. Is it possible that in the future this view could be impressive?
Across the Vardar, in the first stretch close to the riverbank, I was in a building site. New statues: the one of Phillip nearing completion; Cyril and Methodius, the Greek Macedonian evangelists of the Slavs. Beyond that, the old bazaar area is much as I remember it. It was a sunny weekend at the start of spring when I was there. People were sitting outside the cafes, drinking tea or beer, eating grilled meat or sticky cakes. It’s all on a more manageable scale than the colossal new city going up a hundred metres away. Here it is still possible to relax. But there are plans for this end of town as well.
Albanians, who make up some 20 per cent of Skopje’s population, had objected that all the new statuary reflected Macedonians’ history and Macedonian heroes of no relevance to them. In response, a few notable Albanians were added to the list of statues. Among them is Skanderbeg, the greatest of all Albanian heroes, who held out for 20 years against the Ottoman advance in the 15th century. A much more modest statue than most of the others going up, I rather liked it. In contrast to the monuments in Tirana and Prishtina, his sword is sheathed. He looks less ferocious, more approachable perhaps, if that is what one wants from a Skanderbeg statue. At the moment, the statue is in an odd position on the edge of the bazaar district, looking out over the highway that runs through the city. But he is to have a square of his own. One of the objections raised by a Macedonian friend to the city’s makeover is that, rather than uniting the city, it reinforces its division. In future, Macedonians will have their square, and Albanians will have theirs.
And how much is it all costing? This is another source of controversy. Critics accuse the authorities of a lack of transparency or public consultation. To someone used to the planning process in the UK, the years of debate and argument involved in any public infrastructure project, the speed with which the transformation of Skopje is being pushed ahead is astounding. Macedonia is a poor country. Economic activity was already focused to a considerable extent on Skopje. Does it make sense to undertake such a vast, expensive vanity project? And does it make sense to focus so much investment on the already privileged capital city? So much of Skopje city centre still looks slightly grubby and unkempt, parks not properly cared for, pavements crumbling. Does the plan include such details that go to make a city beautiful? Might not an effort to revamp the city have focused on such details? My worst fear is that, in a few years’ time, the new monuments and buildings may start to look the worse for wear as well. Oh dear, Skopje, what have they done to you?
*Later that night, while searching for a bar that was still open, we met a young woman who spoke English. She said she was from Zagreb, and was herself visiting Skopje. She suggested we hop in her car, and that she would find an open bar. She was clearly very drunk, and getting in a car with her was surely a bad idea. But we were quite drunk too, beyond the point of responsible decision-making. It was terrifying, racing around, ignoring traffic lights, barely maintaining control. The car was a Yugo, not such a bad car at the time. In my fear, I gripped the inside door handle so tightly that it, and the whole interior lining of the door, came off in my hand. Suddenly she lurched to a stop, for no apparent reason. The American and I took our chance and jumped out.
We were close to the railway station, and from somewhere nearby we could hear music. Still thinking about finding more booze, we walked towards it. On a piece of waste ground, tables were laid out, piled with food and drink. A makeshift stage had been erected, and musicians were playing. The people were Romany. They welcomed us, offered us a seat at their table, gave us bottles of beer, thrust food in front of us. They couldn’t talk to us, but then the crazy drunk woman from Zagreb turned up. She interpreted for us, and explained that the celebration was to mark the circumcision of a young boy. It was a happy atmosphere.
Then a policeman arrived. He sat down next to us, and was offered food and drink by the solicitous Romany hosts. He could speak a little English. He asked us what we were doing there, where we were staying? It all seemed quite friendly. And then suddenly, he said ‘you go now; go home.’ We were confused. Why would we want to leave? We were having fun. We stayed put. And then a couple of minutes later, this time firmly, an instruction, with a tone of warning: ‘Leave now; go home.’ We got up smartly and left, leaving the girl from Zagreb with a beer in her hand. Walking back to the youth hostel, we were bemused. What had been going on? Did the policeman know or suspect something we did not? Were we not safe there? Was something afoot? Twenty-five years later, my memories of that evening are as clear as ever. But I never understood what happened.
Skopje’s placid exterior belies tensions beneath the surface between the different ethnic communities. Visiting the city shortly after the 2001 Albanian insurgency, a young, very articulate Albanian working for one of the western embassies told me that the next time, Albanians would go the whole way, and take all the territory that was rightfully, historically theirs, including Skopje. No matter that Albanians made up barely 20 per cent of the city’s population. But he was from Tetovo, the overwhelmingly Albanian city in the north-west of the country, commuting daily to work in the capital. Despite its tensions and divisions, Skopje had always been more relaxed. A few years later, I visited a radio station, which doubled as a bar, and broadcast in both Macedonian and Albanian.
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